


Dormant

by heldor



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dominant/Top Sam Winchester, Incest, M/M, Season/Series 01, Sibling Incest, Travel, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:43:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heldor/pseuds/heldor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's always kept an eye on his little brother. When Sam comes back from Stanford, Dean learns just how much college can change a man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dormant

**Author's Note:**

> Slow start, but things get more heated in the next chapter, ha. Mostly posting to force myself to stop fretting over edits. Un-beta'd except by myself.

Sam’s leant over a door, resting on two upturned oil drums, shirt off, filling shells from a canister of buckshot with a look of intense concentration. Dean is watching his brother, mind a thousand miles away as he stares at Sam; his hands, his chest, the way his fingers twist the press with an effortless well-practiced grace, but wondering too what else you could put into shells as he rubs a handmade silver bullet between his fingers. Bless the buckshot, maybe, Dean thinks- for demons, not that they’ve had many encounters with those. It wouldn’t kill them, so Dad wouldn’t like it. He’d say it was a waste of time, he knows _that_ well enough, but he stares at Sammy anyway, bringing the glass coke bottle up to his lips as he finds himself staring at the way Sam’s chest expands and contracts with every breath. His brother’s seventeen, and finally, finally starting to fill out a little. He stood back to back with Dean at a motel a few weeks ago and dad eyeballed the difference in their heights as Dean felt their heat melting into one another in the cold room through the thinness of two well-worn t-shirts. Dean’s was army surplus, and Sam’s was a hand-me-down from his brother; they lived in each other’s skins.

“I think he’s gonna give you a run for your money, Dean,” John had said, smiling at the two of them as he raised the beer bottle to his lips, “who’d’a thought it; two giants in the family. If I’m right, I think he’s gonna make you look short by the time he’s done growin’, boy.” Dean was boy; Sam was kid. It let them know their places in the world.

“Yeah, right. Like that’s ever gonna happen, right Sammy?” he slapped him on the back, just a little too hard, grabbing the back of his neck and wrestling him a little, “You’re gonna be the squirt for life.” They wrestled for a moment until they were both breathless, and John yelled that that was enough already- Sam shrugged his grip off with a grin, for a minute looking like his old self, but the far-away look of distraction he’d been wearing for the last few months quickly replaced it.

Sam moved the tray of rounds aside and began on a new one, only half-looking, using the majority of his attention to read the text book he had balanced open on the makeshift table beside him.

“Dean!” John slams his hand on the side of the run-down house they’re currently squatting in, leaning out from the doorway, making them both jump, “for god’s sake, boy- I called you three times already, I call your name you come running, you hear me? You know better. Leave your brother alone, he’s got a job to do, same as you.” Sam looks up, pushing his hair out of his face, glancing quickly at Dean and then to John.

“He’s not bothering me, dad.” Sam glances up at his brother and they share a smile.

“Yeah, well. Dean- you keep leaning on the car like that you’re gonna scratch it.” It feels like with that road of chewing Dean out gone he’s quickly flipped onto another track; anything to make him hop to the task he wants him doing just that little bit faster. Sam licks his lips, wipes his hands on the rag beside him and gets back to work. Dean pushes himself off from where he’d been leaning on the sun-black-hot of the Impala’s passenger door. “Get in this house and do something useful stead’a staring a hole in that boy’s head, you hear me?”

“Yes sir,” Dean mutters, oddly embarrassed considering he was doing nothing wrong. He feels like he’s been rumbled, and he comes when called, but Sam catches his eye as he passes and a conversation happens in the look; Sam’s telling him not to let dad get to him, and Dean’s telling him not to worry. Dad still yells at them, but it doesn’t hit Dean as hard as it did when he was a kid. He’s almost a fully fledged grown up now. He puts his half-finished coke down on the bench beside Sam as he goes inside, and he sees him pick it up and finish it in one long draught from the corner of his vision.

“Boy, you get in here.”

“Sir.”

 

Just a few months later, Sam is gone. Run away to Stanford- never to come back, most likely. Dean remembers the journey with Dad afterwards- silent, Dean trying to hold in his emotions; he’s twenty years old; coming up on twenty one  in a handful of months, and a hunter, and a man, and he can’t cry, even though his brother is _gone_ and he left his cell phone, and he knows that he and John will have changed their numbers ten times by the time they’re in the next state over, and how will Sam be able to come home when their home is never the same place two days in a row?

When they were still in school they’d stay in the same place for as long as they could; John making road trips, but now they’re all grown up it’s life in the car and the open road, and Sam can never come home. He’ll never come home and it will be Dean and John forever, alone, because you can’t trust anyone who isn’t family, and these two people and this one car are all Dean has of the life he was promised as a little kid, and now Sam is gone, and he slumps down in his seat and rests his knees on the dashboard, in the way that only someone raised living in a car could ever find comfortable. Another man might have put his feet up, but anything to do with feet and the interior of the Impala is sure to get an earful from John- god damnit, I’ve had this car longer’n you’ve been alive, you get your feet down right now if you wanna keep those feet, so it’s knees, and even that would usually get him yelled at, so it’s a sign of how John’s feeling that he says nothing. When they pull over for gas he even throws the keys at Dean and puts on a show of false joviality.

“How about you drive for a while, huh? I could use some shut eye.”

“Dad-“ his voice is hesitant, and John knows where it’s going because his face shuts down and his voice goes hard.

“Dean we talked about this already. Your brother knew what he was gettin’ into when he left that room.”

“He didn’t wanna go, dad! Not like that. He just-“

“He just _what_ Dean? Just chose Stanford over us, over this family? Over _you_? Your brother is a selfish boy, Dean. He’s a selfish boy and he’s never gonna be able to help us do what has to be done if he can’t get over this-“ Dean’s a natural peacekeeper; they’ve had some variant of this argument; Sam and Dad in separate rooms, Dean trying to reforge a dialogue, a thousand times over the last six or so years. Ever since Sam realised he could question, because even though Dad would get mad, he never got mad at Sam how he did with Dean. He could get away with it, so long as his brother was there to smooth feathers.

“I know, but-“

“But nothing, Dean. You listening to me, son? Where was that gonna go? What’s he need college for, huh? And a law degree? That ain’t gonna help us find this thing that killed your mom. It’s no good for this life, so what’s he want it for? If I said he could go off, come back when he feels like it? He don’t deserve to be in this family if he ain’t out here taking his knocks.”

“But da-“

“and if he gets his degree, then what? You think he’s gonna be satisfied to come back here? You think he’ll be sharp enough to do the job that’s gotta be done, if he’s spent years in a library? No. Because that’s not why he wants to go. Whether I’d said he could dance in and out of our lives as much as he likes, or whether I said what I said- the end point is the same, Sam’s gone, Dean. He left the minute he sent off that application letter- him leavin’ tonight was just proof of that, ok? You don’t get a fancy law degree from some big-league ivy league college unless you’re planning on leaving, ok Dean? Have you got it yet? Your brother doesn’t want us, he doesn’t want _you_. He wants this whole other life which he ain’t gonna get from us, and he’s never coming back. He made that choice. He made that choice, and we gotta live with it, but you know what? It’s better we’re rid of him now, boy, you hear me? Are you listening to me, Dean?”

“Yes sir.” He’s twenty years old, and he’s a man, and he can’t cry, but he suddenly feels ten years old again, staring down at his shoes, getting talked down by his father, and he murmurs the response.

“What was that?”

“Yessir, sir. I said yes, sir.” He forces himself to look up, setting his jaw, and he even makes eye contact, and he can only guess at how much steel is in his gaze, because John actually takes a half step back, though he quickly turns it into opening the car door.

“Ok. Good. Now, get in the car. We got a lot of miles to travel before morning. I wanna see about a haunting in St Louis-” Dean filters his words out. Just turns the ignition and lets the engine flip into life with the roar he knows so well, ticking over into a rattle like a can full of marbles spinning over. He drives where John motions him until John stops talking and falls asleep, but he follows the signs, even though his heart is telling him that if he turned around now he could make it back to Sam. That maybe he’s sitting at a bus station somewhere wishing he’d made another call. His heart’s telling him that. But his stomach is warning him; what if, what if. What if he’s gone, what if he’s happy, what if even now he’s sleeping in a motel bed with a smile on his face, full of excitement for the future, the choice he’s made.

 

Dean drives to St Louis.

 

*

With Sam gone it’s like the both of them; him and dad, have their strings cut- John discovers he’s not penned in by the confines of the stage, he goes flying; leaves Dean with the Impala while he drives an old Mustang, taking on cases of his own and leaving Dean behind; he doesn’t need anyone’s help. He’s the great John Winchester, and even his own son will only slow him down- I don’t want to have to worry about you Dean- and Dean isn’t sure if it would be out of concern for his wellbeing, or out of a belief that he was a liability, even after all these years.

                When Dean’s strings get cut he falls to the boards. It takes him a long time to work his way back up to his feet. He tries to find a fit for himself in the world that has for all his life been inhabited by two; it’s always been John, and Sam and Dean; the pair of them in the backseat with the map, or the books, or the county records, sitting up with the laminator making fake I.Ds. It takes Dean a long time to learn how to be a whole, rather than a half, and how best he can fit into the space Sam has left behind in his and Dean’s life.

They still grift, and swindle, though Dean seems to do ever more of the trickery- hustling pool, dice, cards; taking bets on fights. He’s a tall man, and broad, but he still has the barest hint of a boy about his face, which is too pretty by half to be taken seriously; people assume he’ll have a glass jaw, or be terrified of taking a hit to the face for fear of damaging his looks. So he can throw a couple of fights before someone makes a decent-sized bet against him and he comes up with a sweet right jab that takes a man twice his size down. John makes money in some way Dean’s not entirely sure of, but while Dean comes home with five hundred dollars John comes back with five grand. No matter how much money he makes, or how little, Dean always makes a point to send three hundred dollars a month to Stanford. He’s not sure of where Sam’s living; on campus or off, or which dorm, but he writes his envelopes  “SAMUEL WINCHESTER/CARE OF STUDENT ADMINISTRATION DEPT.” He’s only sure Sam won’t be using a pseudonym because he figures he’ll need to have his real name on his degree once he’s done.  He sends them every month for more than two years, before they finally come to check the post office box he’s been using as a return address in Denver and he finds twenty six identical envelopes all marked return to sender; some slim with six fifty dollar bills, some thicker with more; he always tried to send extra at the beginnings of semesters, in case Sam needed books or... whatever it was you needed at college. He wasn’t sure of semester dates, but he tried to do what he could whenever he could, and John cuffs him around the head so hard he sees stars and tells him not to waste money.

“Your brother knows how to make a buck, same as you. It’s up to him to feed himself, ain’t your responsibility.” Dean would laugh- How can John not know how fundamentally opposite to Dean’s entire upbringing that sentence is? He always, _always_ takes care of Sammy. When John would go away for two weeks on a hunting trip and leave the two boys alone with a dozen cans of alphaghetti, a loaf of white bread and twenty dollars, but five miles away from civilisation, Dean always took half portions if it meant Sam didn’t have to be hungry.

 John would come back to find Dean ten pounds lighter and clap him around the head for being an idiot before forcing him to eat two hamburgers, fries, a large chocolate milkshake- eat it all, Dean- you need the fat and the sugar; lots of protein- while the diner waitress married the ketchups on the end of the bar, watching him glaring down at his skinny, none-too-clean kids at 2am- looking for bruises, waiting to see if Dean or Sam flinched from an upraised hand which would never have come in public. They didn’t live like kids, but Dean did his best to make sure Sam got as close to it as he could manage.

*

After nearly four years, Dean has grown up.  He has to shave every morning, now. He wears an old leather jacket of John’s because his own windbreaker no longer fit over his shoulders, which are wide and muscled. His hands are more accustomed to the fit of the steering wheel, or the pearl-handle of his pistol; he had it special-made in Tennessee, than a partner’s hand or a soft-touch. His clothes are hard wearing- leather, denim, heavy work boots, army surplus or John’s hand-me-downs. His face doesn’t smile as much as it used to, because there’s no one to talk to, but he still plays peacekeeper when he can, though nowadays it’s mostly between John and the demons the man carries in himself. They start to work apart more and more often. Dean’s old enough now that he could play John’s partner when they put on their fed suits, but he looks too much like John’s son when in civvies to keep up the charade too much- it’s not just his looks, it’s the way he automatically defers, the way John speaks like there’s no question he’ll be obeyed. They can never play convincing partners for long.

They work separate a lot, even if it’s on the same case- interviewing different witnesses, one researching, the other stalking. John has always been more like Sam than Dean, no matter how much both boys might have wanted to switch places. Dean is Mary’s son; a peacekeeper, level-headed. People mistake him for being stupid because he’s kind, and quick to joke. But there’s a reason they have shotgun rounds full of salt instead of buckshot now, and it’s Dean who came up with it. He’d had the inkling of it that day all those years ago, watching Sam fill rounds, and after a little trial and error he packed the first set himself, tested them on a poltergeist in Maryland. He built their first E.M.F reader out of an old radio, and every time he produces a wonder, John takes it as no less than he ought to be doing, and gradually they drift apart. For Dean, it’s because being around your God every day gets tiring, for John it’s because he can’t stop even to think that Dean isn’t following.

 

When John disappears completely, however, Dean can only take the loneliness for so long before he cracks. There’s a difference between being alone and knowing that the person you’re taking for granted as being around has _gone_ , and John is Gone. Three weeks. No answer, no location, no forwarding address, no agreed rendezvous- he knows where the case he was working at is, and that’s it, no certainty that dad’ll be there; it’s only by chance that he knows where he’s working; it’s a specific stretch of road, and Dean knows he can’t go alone. His mind has three settings; Hunter, Son, Brother, and he can do nothing in either of the first two gears right now.

It’s been four years, but the road to California feels natural. He takes the I-40, West, through New Mexico, from New Orleans. It’s a long drive- a heavy thirty hours alone in the Impala, and he takes as few breaks as he can; a couple hours shut eye in Albuquerque when he feels his head’s about to explode from staring at the road, pulling up into a rest stop and locking all the doors, napping with his gun in his hand- when he wakes up he realises he’s missed a call from John, and curses himself as he listens back to the cryptic, crackling, phone message- “be very careful.”  He knows he’s made the right choice in heading towards Sam; he can’t do this alone. Or... well. He can, but he realises he really, _really_ doesn’t want to. He catches four more just outside of Flagstaff, with only eight or so hours left to his journey; he wants to be sharp when he pulls up into California. It’s an impossibly long trip that would leave most people exhausted, but Dean’s used to long stretches of time on the road with no one to pass the wheel to, and so he creeps into Stanford as quietly as the Impala will allow him to be at around four  on a Friday afternoon.

It doesn’t take long to find Sam’s address. He’s... _active_. He’s what he and Sam, years ago, would have called _conspicuous_ ; an easy mark. Debate team, Law Society, Future Lawyers of America Society, Honours society, Model United Nations; they all have directories, and they all point to an apartment block near to the university campus; original glazing; sash windows, no deadbolts. All the residents are students, used to a lot of noise at night, and with no interest in looking out for their neighbours; easy enough to break into, and Dean is surprised that his brother could have gotten so sloppy in four years as to live in a place like this, with so few precautions. Dad was right. Sam’d be no good in a hunt if this is how he’s living. He leaves it until night to make his way inside the building; what he has to say to Sam is something he doesn’t want to say on the front step, and in some place deep inside of him he’s terrified that his brother won’t even let him into the house. It’s the same reason he didn’t just call. He’s not sure how much four years will have changed his little brother; his argument was always with John, but he knows the kid; in four years, he’s probably started let himself stew on the fact that Dean stayed with dad. As though he’d had a choice; Dean wasn’t getting any scholarships to Ivy League universities.

As kids, flipping through magazines in gas stations waiting for their dad, Sam always used to talk about Camaros; a ’68 camaro, blue with the white stripe; Just similar enough to the Impala, their home, to be ‘real’ just different enough to be his dream car, and for some reason for the last four years, since he’s living his dream life, Dean’s imagined Sam driving a Camaro. But outside in the space marked as being for Sam’s address there’s a cream Volkswagen Beetle with flowers on the dashboard. It’s a chick’s car, and Dean knows that Sam doesn’t live alone in this apartment, too large for one person with no family helping him, to afford. In the guest space beside it there’s an ancient old green Volkswagen Rabbit that looks to be held together by hopes and dreams. One side has been rubbed down to get rid of rust, or flaking paint. It’s just enough to get a desperate college senior into campus on time every day.

He jimmies the lock up and goes through the vehicle methodically; a couple of campus parking tickets, screwed up in a ball and unpaid, a discarded pair of ladies’ gloves, empty candy wrappers; a Twix bar in the glove box which Dean eats; they always used to hide their treats as kids, knowing full well the other would eat them if they found them. Sam always used to think the glove compartment was impenetrable. There’s a map in there with a road trip marked out, but instead of the destination being a hunting job, it’s an hour away in South Beach, San Francisco. The map smells like sunscreen.

There’s a binder full of notes on tort law on the passenger seat, and a paper with Sam’s name on it. Dean fights the urge to run his thumb over the printed letters. He flips open to the grade, like when Sam would bring home his report cards and Dean would play dad. 113% - “another great paper, Mr Winchester! Well done, Sam. Looking forward to seeing your name on my internship list this summer!” the note says, and Dean’s heart fills with pride. He can’t stop himself grinning. Sam abandoned him, their family, but he’s doing well. Dean didn’t think he’d have been able to take it if Sam had left and then been a miserable failure with no family to escape back to. There’s a pink post-it note stuck in the front of Sam’s blue binder, a heart surrounding a lipstick kiss, and Dean smirks, though he feels an odd sort of hitch in his chest at the same time.

He doesn’t know why; is already sure of what he’ll find, but he opens up the trunk and rifles around. There’s a backpack, full of library books, bristling with bookmarks made of ripped notebook paper and note-covered loose leaf binder paper covered in Sam’s scrawling handwriting, written with a ball point pen- he presses so hard that the pages are crinkly with the pressure; you could read the words with your fingertips on the other side of the paper- his handwriting’s gotten even spikier and unreadable in the last four years; he must do a lot of writing now, Dean supposes. Post it notes mark out as “N.B” “VERY IMPORTANT!!!” “HAYNE’S CLASS?” things which Dean has no understanding of at all. There’s a sleeping bag, and Dean suspects it’s left there from some long-ago night staying at a friend’s house after a drunken night, or a camping trip, rather than because Sam regularly has to spend a night in the car. The space for the spare wheel contains the wheel, a warning triangle and a screwed up hi-vis jacket which is so filthy it must have come with the car. There’s a jack, but no secret compartment; no weapons cache. There’s a bag of salt, but somehow Dean suspects its presence has more to do with icy mornings than protection from demons and spirits.

He finds a motel and sleeps for a few hours; he’s good at turning off; it’s a skill much prized in hunters. You either learn to sleep when you can, regardless of how stressed, frightened or amped up you are, or else you quickly fizzle out; Either you just drop out, unable to take the life, or, more likely, you get wasted by a monster when you’re trying to work while exhausted and unable to concentrate, with your reaction-time shot.

                He leaves the motel at one; never even took his bag out of the car, and he goes without looking back. He doesn’t look back any more.


End file.
